Thanks for all the responses so far. I'm replying in one big reply, instead of individual replies, because people are kind-of saying the same things, so a single reply will suffice.
I realized what I really want is ZFS on osx, but since the death of zevo and greenbytes, I've outruled that option. So I just googled for it again, and apparently there is another project currently maintained, O3X. (Openzfs On OsX). https://openzfsonosx.org I'll try this, and setup snapshot replication for the guest OS, and see what happens. It might be just what I'm looking for. I agree that RDP is pretty good nowadays, but the RDP experience is definitely *not* as good as physical, for several reasons. First, all the little graphics effects of Aero are disabled over RDP, which significantly worsens the user experience. That in itself is enough for me to call it fatal to the intended use case. Similarly, TeamViewer et al might be ok for occasional usage, enabling mobility. Definitely not good enough for everyday use. It is a no-go, to backup the files inside a VM, and *separately* periodically backup the whole VM, in such a way that requires the guest VM to be shutdown, and user driven. My experience is that any backup requiring manual intervention or user interruption doesn't actually occur. It needs to be automatic and non-intrusive, or else it doesn't happen. For some users, a need to reinstall windows as part of the recovery process might be ok - such as accountants etc, who just need MS Office and My Documents - but for others (usually the people I support) developers and engineers have massive tooling installed, with lots and lots of configuration. It normally takes a few days of effort, up to a week of manual effort, to reinstall and reconfigure all the development tools. For this reason, whole-system snapshots and bare metal recovery to a completely configured, fully functional state are vital. I will look at VMWare Horizon View. I will also look at NX. I know the whole purpose of NX is to be a better alternative to VNC and X and RDP. I know for linux servers, NX beats the crap out of VNC. I don't know if NX will provide a nearly-native experience for running a windows desktop. Will give it a try. After trying O3X. :-) _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list Tech@lists.lopsa.org https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
